Garbage Challenge Strategies

Alright, we're in our second month of what we've been calling "The Garbage Challenge", and we're starting to put to use some of the strategies that will (fingers crossed) help us reduce our total waste.

1) Get paperless statements.
2) Use rags instead of paper towels. My paper towel usage is quite embarrassing.
3) Pay attention to packaging.
4) Reuse produce bags.
5) COMPOST. We will post again on this later once we are moved into our house and using an actual outdoor composter. We're still trying to decide what kind of composter is best...

In the interim, we are just using a small bin with a tight lid to hold our food scraps.
6) Eat more whole foods. Including foods we will grow in our own backyard this summer! (hopefully)

We also want to find a way to opt-out of junk mailings, since they make up about 50% of the mail we get and they always go straight to the trash. Haven't figured this out yet though.

And here are some things we already do:

1) Reusable grocery bags.
2) Never buy bottled water. And if we have to, we refill them as many times as we can before recycling them.
3) Save and reuse gift bags/tissue paper.
4) Recycling. I hate to admit it, but I was once a non-recycler.

So, that's the plan! We'll see soon if it's actually working.

The Garbage Challenge - Month 1

Happy Earth Day! (Only a day late)

We have been weighing our garbage for about a month now and (as promised) we want to share the results with you! Overall, we had almost 73 lb of trash in 4 weeks. Here is the breakdown across the 5 categories we have been tracking:

What we've called "Misc." is basically just everything that doesn't fit into one of the other categories, and, as you can see, it is a huge portion of our trash. It's quite perplexing to me, really that we have that much random garbage. I don't even know what that consists of. I guess that's one of our goals through this process though is to become more conscious of what we are throwing out and figuring out how we can minimize it.

In my original post, I gave you some stats on how much garbage the average American produces in a day. Here's how we stack up:

There are some caveats to our data that make us look far less wasteful than we actually are. In particular, our data only includes trash from our home. The data we collected from the Clean Air site includes waste generated at work, restaurants, etc.

One of our goals in this project is definitely to reduce the amount of trash we have overall. The thought that we could potentially produce almost 1,000 lb of garbage in one year make me sick to my stomach. Eek.

A second goal of our is to increase the percentage of our trash that is reusable in some way (recyclable or compostable). This first month our garbage was pretty much 50-50 between reusable and "true waste".

And how are we going to reach those goals? Still trying to figure that out. Check back later!

Reducing Waste

My husband comes up with several crazy ideas per week, examples:

"Hey let's drop everything and bum around Australia for a couple years!"
"Hey let's sell all our stuff and live in an RV!"
"Hey let's become beekeepers!"

Not even joking, those are all real things he has pitched to me. And they are almost always inspired by some crazy blog he just found. So one day, he found this crazy blog. The idea I want to tell you about was actually just one part of one post on the site (the Early Retirement Extreme idea was also presented to me, but I'll save that story for another day). Instead, his crazy idea was something like this:

"Hey let's start weighing our garbage and keep the data in a spreadsheet!"

My response was: "OK yeah, that sounds cool." Aaron pretty much did a double take. "Really? You're on board with this?! OK!"

So we came up with a plan, at the start of the next month, we were going to start weighing our garbage, and we are going to keep track of everything in a few different categories: Recyclables, Paper, Compostables, Bathroom Garbage, and Miscellaneous. We gathered up a kitchen scale for food waste, a bathroom scale for the heavier stuff, and different boxes/containers that we'll use to separate everything. Then before we take anything out, it gets weighed and recorded. So after the first 30 days, we'll have a sense of how much of our garbage is reusable in some way and how much is true waste.

Our motivation for this challenge can best be outlined by a few datapoints from this site:

In 2008, the average amount of waste generated by each person in America per day was 4.5 pounds. 1.1 pounds of that was recycled, and .4 pounds, including yard waste, was sent to composting. In total, 24.3% of waste was recycled, 8.9% was composted, and 66.8% was sent to a landfill or incinerated.

The first month is going to be our control period. We're not going to alter behaviors when it comes to our garbage, other than trying to collect a baseline. However, we will be doing research to find various ways that we can reduce our total waste. The second 30-day period will be spent trying to put those strategies to use! At the end of that period, we can compare the data to see if anything we did actually made an impact (on our impact). We plan to post our results (and strategies) along the way. So stay tuned.